[skypilotpete]

My value and reading of the situation?

The situation is clear. The deDRMing to distribute ebooks is illegal. The standard value is the law. Period.

Not all laws are good, and bad laws do not deserve to be followed. The mindless acceptance of legal authority can lead to any number of appalling results. I would have thought that would have been quite obvious to anyone who lists their address as Berlin.

You want make it better by calling it "sharing" or any other term to cover the facts. It just does not work with me.

I know it doesn't work for you, and that's fine. My position is accurately presented by Darcey's post earlier in this discussion:

I personally believe that the sharing of books between close friends and family members is a social convention that dates back far further then copyright and doesn't disappear just because the book is no longer distributed on pulp. For me it's a part of social culture. Trying to control down to this level is far beyond the original intent of copyright and is a huge power grab by the industry. I certainly don't want laws to get down to this level of anal detail.

As far as I am concerned, the behaviour of ebook publishers and sellers in seeking to restrict the rights of purchasers goes way beyond what is reasonable, and is part and parcel of international capitalism run rampant. I feel no moral obligation to kowtow to their money-grabbing behaviour.

Please let me know where I set any values or read something into the situation that was not there in your OP.

In my original post I clearly said that I wanted to "share these converted ebooks with friends - as I would feel entitled to do with any other book that I purchased." I did not say that I would be sharing them indiscriminately or uploading them to torrent sites. But you simply assumed this in your original post and said;

you are wondering if your ""friends" from the torrent site won't do it if ask to... [sic]

You made an unwarrented and groundless assumption that what I really meant was that I wanted find out if it was safe for me to upload to torrent sites - absolutely untrue!

My real concern was accurately represented by intheendofdays when he/she said:

Originally Posted by intheendofdays

The issue is that whilst you might trust the person you cannot be sure where the file will end up, especially after a few years. For example: you pass it onto your mother-in-law who in turn passes it a friend, who shares it with someone at work ad nauseum and it eventually ends up on a file sharing site. File sharing sites are quite difficult to get files taken off of, mainly because they say that they are just connecting people and do not hold the files on their servers, so the copyright holder would likely come after you as your name is on the copyright page.

Enough said for today...